Okay, here's a suggestion, tempered by the fact that I know I'm probably shooting in the dark. So I'll preface this by saying it's just a good natured suggestion, and if it's infinately impossible, improbable, or just plain stupid, I claim full responsibility, or, I at least promise to blame the next closest person.

Anyhow, for those of us not utilizing RSS feeds, for whatever reason (be it not having a good place to do so, not caring to get every release, etc) could their possibly be a ROM waiting list?

I mean like, if I was waiting for say, the USA version of an upcoming ROM, it'd be cool if I could add myself to a tracker for the particular game. So when the game is dumped, I could get an e-mail or something. Sort of like how you can track threads for responses, instead of having to get a list of every new topic on the forum everyday, on some forums you can just subscribe to a particular thread and be notified of when the topic has been replied to.

I realize it's a long way around a problem that could be solved by using an RSS feed, but if it *is* possible, then it would save a lot of people having to wade through 90% of titles they aren't interested in, just to get to the few they would like to try.

If it's entirely a looney concept, I use the excuse that it's 5am, and I should be asleep.

Correct me if i'm wrong, but we'd need to compile a database of every gba game that is coming out in the future then make a way to supscripe to that game and THEN link that to the rom release posts......that's not going to happen

Well you wouldn't need to necessarily create a database of games coming out in the future, that would be very complicated you could have people join trackers based on search strings.

So say I put in the name of a game into the tracker, and when ever rom is released it checks the name of the games people have put on their track list, if it's similiar enough, then a message is sent to them, it isn't full proof, but if you know the name of the game your waiting for, you'd be able to wait for it, and if something comes out that has 80% of the string you entered as the ROM you where waiting for, then you get a message.

Edit--

Here's my thought process:

If I were to go to the search area and input Yu-Gi-Oh, it would search the database of roms and all Yu-Gi-Oh games would come up, but had I searched for a Yu-Gi-Oh game prior to any having been made I'd get no results. It's how search engines work. So, I merely would need something that would keep my search string "Yu-Gi-Oh" and try it in the database every so often. Once a Yu-Gi-Oh game was added to the database, a hit would return in the search, and I could be notified of that.

No knowledge of future releases would ever be needed, if I put Super Punchout Advance into the name field, and no game of that name ever comes out, I'll never get a hit, and never would recieve a notification.

It would behoove people to be sure of what they put exactly on there watch list, and I'm unsure how much more it would tax the bandwidth to have a scheduled time for all the weekly searches to take place. (I'm assuming not much, considering how heavily the search function is probably already used.)

So basically, it's a simple idea, and while I don't know the particulars, having it automatically search for a particular string seems simple enough an addition, since that would be the only thing that would need to be added, well that, and the code that e-mails any hits the search finds to moi. Heck, you could probably even make it so it wouldn't count hits numbered under a certian amount, so you only want to check from 2000 forward...

Once I had a bit longer to think about it, I figured out that there would be no problem of having to know if a game was coming out in the future, or if it was being dumped at all. If and when it did, the search would pick it up the same week, and everyone who was waiting for it, would be notified.

It sounds like a lot of effort for such a trivial task. It takes less than a minuite to load the release list and search it. Just check once a month; what does it matter if you don't have the rom the second it comes out?